Welcome to
The City. A sepiatone world lit by guttering gas lamps and the flickering filaments of
electric bulbs. A closed world, isolated and alone. Stinking canals radiate out through
The City, thick with effluent and the detritus of millions of lives. Dank alleys wend
between corroding concrete towerblocks, wide boulevards swarm with peddlers, traders,
sellers, buyers, thieves and victims. The City is full of dark places where the lights of
knowledge, morality and justice fail to glow.

Welcome to The City. A world of contrasts and contradictions.
The citizens live their lives in a tangle of technological obscurity. In crumbling brick
tenements, they crowd round dim televisions, sedated by the media output. In the
factories, workshops, mills and yards, they toil and strain with rusting, decaying
machinery. Above them all, the macrocorps stand like gods, islands of glittering
advancement in a sea of black oil, flaking iron and reeking gas.

Welcome to The City. A world of pain, fear, longing and
hatred. Where the basest human emotions rise to the surface, where men will cripple each
other for a dull shilling. Yet light, life, love and hope manage to raise their voices,
occasionally heard above the clamour of darkness. Through all the evil and wreckage, some
still manage to retain a sense of decency and honour.

Welcome to The City. A world of superstition, folk tales, wild
religion and rampant rumour. The Shift and The Bombardment are apocalyptic legends from
the far past, feeding the nightmares and fantasies of current generations. Some pray to
God for salvation, others pray to a cold, empty universe. In hidden places, black rites
are carried out, for reasons as varied and obscure as The City itself. Folk heroes and
villains stalk the streets: Ticktock Man, The Leaper, Iron Lady. They all contribute to
the second city, the city carried on the tongues and in the minds of its citizens.

Welcome to The City. A world of strangers and beings who do
not belong. The Shifted, strange entities, whispered about in pubs and taverns. Mentioned
in guarded conversations, lest the very mention of their name summon them from the dark.
The Ubel, twitching and creaking through the backstreets in their bloodstained rags,
chittering incomprehensibly. Lugner, whispering maddening dreams in the night. Drache, as
insubstantial as mist, clouds of unreason. Hager, assassins and kidnappers, looming
figures cast in black cloth and pale flesh. The Simils, pitied and reviled in equal
measure, clanking golems of iron, brass and stone.

Welcome to The City.
You will never forget The City.
But The City will forget you.

Nearly one thousand years ago, as far as anyone
can tell, an event took place. Why and how this event happened remains unknown. But it
happened, and since then, things have been different in The City. Philosophers, scientists
and poets agree that the The City once had a name. In the present it is simply called The
City, for there is nowhere else other than the blasted Outlands.

The event came to be known as The Shift, a change
in reality so great that the very fabric of The City was changed forever. Places and
people were altered, new beings sprang, fully formed into existence. One fact that is
known is that almost immediately after The Shift, The City was subjected to a rain of fire
known as The Bombardment. Infernos fell from the sky and laid waste to whole tracts of
land. More important than the destruction of the physical was the destruction of knowledge
that The Bombardment caused. Datacores were wiped, libraries reduced to ashes and the
memories of the survivors scarred. No remnant of life before The Shift and The Bombardment
remains, only a few structures of vast size and strength remain to remind the inhabitants
of the past. For centuries people have lived in limbo, the only history that of the past
hundred decades.

Rumours circulate that The Outlands were
once fertile and green, now they are a blasted land of desert and rock. The City is a
place of dark alleys, ponderous architecture and stinking canals. In the century following
these two cataclysmic events, the survivors sought to band together and make some sort of
life for themselves. Not only did they have to deal with a lack of technology, they had to
deal with the creatures which became know as the Simils, the Ubel, the Drache and the
Lugners. The struggles of the first century gave rise to organisations which still exist
today. The eight macrocorps all grew from the ashes, each with their own unique story of
war, decimation and survival.

Over the coming centuries, The City and its inhabitants would reach a
twisted equilibrium with their situation. Society grew and expanded, the population
stuttered, fell and then grew. Sciences and technologies were rediscovered, yet even
today, many live in poverty and primitive conditions. The rediscovered technologies were
harnessed by those who had the power and influence to utilise them. The macrocorps became
bastions of knowledge, hoarding their precious discoveries to themselves, only to find
them ripped away by unceasing war and the more subtle influences of espionage and
treachery.

Now, centuries later, The City is a
study in contrasts. The majority of the population live in tenements and towers built of
brick, stone and concrete. Their dwellings are lit by gas piped in from huge rubbish
heaps, their clothes made from crude fibres and their property that of a society barely
reaching the industrial age. In the domains of the macrocorps, things are very different.
The corporate citizens have access to the finest food, to unlimited power and light, to
shining vehicles and well made clothes. Their soldier who guard them ward off rioters
armed with black powder sparklock weapons, the soldiers themselves carrying sleek gauss
rifles and compact lasers.

In the slums of Mire
End, Dreamingspires and Fogwarren, life is a daily toil, making enough to
get by as best you can. The middle classes fear the slums, envisioning them
encroaching upon their own moderately comfortable lives. In the corporate
bastions of Luminosity Tower, Konkret and The Forbidden City, the corporates
look down upon the teeming million, their workforce and their potential
doom.

Through the
backstreets and alleys, Ubel stalk, ripping and tearing those who come too
close, leaving only a cooling corpse as an echo of their passing. Simils
made of iron and brass, surmounted with a human head, clank their way
through the streets on lay down their existences in the hell of the
Contested Grounds. Lugner spread rumour, fear and suspicion through their
whispers and fleeting dreams.

Some seek to stand up
to the despair and hopelessness. Lostfinders search and investigate for
little or no reward while Stringers piece together fragments of information
to feed into the hungry newswires and memory cores of the Dataflow. The
Provosts of the Three Canals try to enforce some form of law and order in a
chaotic society, holding on to the belief that there is the one place in The
City where life is that little bit better. Others believe that the forces
which prevent anyone leaving this place are corroding, that soon they will
be able to leave this place for a better life among the stars.

The clouds will
one-day part. And then, the people of The City will once again have that
rarest and most precious of commodities: hope.